Recent years have witnessed an increased prevalence of intrinsic and acquired beta-lactamase-producing bacteria, severely limiting human and veterinary medicine therapeutic options. The present study aimed to design specific oligonucleotides for rapid PCR detection of the cephalosporinase-encoding gene blaEC (BlaEC family class C beta-lactamase). A total of three primers were designed to detect 2281 variants of the blaEC gene and two sets of primer pairs were also tested against DNA from 11 strains. The study indicates that the proposed primers should be able to detect 100% of all described blaEC genes in different bacterial strains and monitor their spread. After comparing the amino acid sequences, a phylogenetic tree was created based on the presence of conserved amino acids and homologous motifs. More than 24 760 mutations in BlaEC enzymes have been identified. The mutations involving 371 amino acid positions and these hotspots can change the structure and activity of the monitored enzymes. We predicted several BlaEC enzymes with a broadened substrate activity against higher-generation cephalosporins.
Keywords: AmpC beta-lactamase; PCR; antibiotic resistance; mutation; primer.
© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of FEMS.